I've Been Distant Lately and I'm stuck
First of all, I was able to go to the doctor's on Friday, and he helped me make an appointment with a urologist. Unfortunately, I won't be able to see the urologist until May 10th, but I am trying to get the appointment sooner. I'm probably not going to succeed because medicine seems to be as backed up as the legal system, and it's not like I'm dying or anything. But lately, stress has really been hitting me. Like, hard. I don't know if it's just the pain beating me down over time (I have noticed that it's been making me more irritable), but I just feel... frustrated, distant, and like my head is going to explode. Besides the pain, there's been no major life changes that I've dealt with recently, but it's just a bunch of little things piling up and building up to something massive. And maybe no major life changes are one of them. In a time with little movement in your life, you end up feeling stuck in the mud, and with so many different things I just feel lost and stuck. I understand that a lot of people in their 20's feel this, but I feel like I should be further along in my life than I actually am. Whether it's living on your own, actually having your own car, maybe even starting a relationship of some kind, you've believed that you might not have actually achieved your goals by now, but you feel like you should be... getting closer. You feel like you should at least be moving towards that almighty end. I also feel creatively constipated. I have all of these ideas that I want to explore, that I want to do, but I feel like I don't have the talents or the skills to bring them into fruition. Have any of you ever experienced something like that? This would make a great picture/graphic novel, but you don't think you'd be good enough to draw it? To get good enough to draw that one thing, you'll need to draw some other stuff, but that forces you to choose which ideas you think less of, and it gets in a rotation that goes nowhere. I've also got all of these ideas that compound and hit each other that make things really, really difficult. I want to embark on this novel, that novel, and the other novel, but you can't do everything at once. And then you fear that the other ideas will never get done. And no matter what you're doing, you always, and I mean ALWAYS feel like you could be working on something better, something that has more potential, and you're just wasting your time with what you're doing, and the whole thing is pointless anyways. Okay, maybe you don't feel like that, but I do. Hypergraphia forces me to write, but I haven't done much writing beyond much lists. Lists of things I want to do, and random compilations of things that don't make any sense. I feel like I've been acting hostile, or coldly, to people that I know, regardless of whether I actually am or not. I don't know if they haven't noticed, or if they have and they're aware that I'm in pain that will just not go away. I don't know what I want to do, right now. Ideas that I once thought were perfect feel like shit, and with the whole focus cycle thing, you become very afraid to embark on any new projects that won't take you like five minutes to do. There are two types of projects with me: ones that take no effort, and ones that never get finished. If it takes no effort, there's no reward. If you're never going to finish, why... would I start it? Never mind about what I am going to finish. Which major projects have I finished? They say that a creative work is never truly done, and that's correct, but the only things in my vault that are... cohesive, ones that have a clear end-point that tells the observer that that's where the end is, a person could start from the beginning and reach what they believe to be the end. There are only two of them that I can think of. Little Cassie and Epic: The Humorous RPG. These are the only huge, major things that I had actually finished. Halfway through, Little Cassie becomes a different product. A different genre, entirely. For no reason other than I was frustrated and I just wanted the damn thing out of my life. Epic: The Humorous RPG is a demo. It's not a fully fledged 30 hour quest. But, for what it is, it can stand on its own. It's terrible, sure. The humor is juvenile, the writing is puerile, the combat is very unbalanced, there are stupid annoying mechanics like the save gems. But... it's finished. I bring these two up for a very specific reason: to show how deep this problem goes. There seem to be like two modes: this project I'm working on is the greatest that I will ever do, or it's absolute crap. "This will be the greatest thing I will ever do" in my mind, subconsciously, is synonymous with "I'm going to put my all into this." If I'm not trying to make this next project my magnum opus, I'm just not trying hard enough. I'm being lazy. There's so much more I could do with it. You're wasting potential. This is kind of... the hardest part of having a learning or developmental disorder. You tend to see your skill set - what you're able to do - as fixed. There's a strong feeling that I'll never really learn anything. Let me... try to explain this. When I was a young child, I had Velcro shoes. Most young children did. However, as they got older, they moved onto laces. However, no one could explain to me why laced shoes were superior to Velcro shoes. They were a hassle, they were harder to learn. I had no reason to learn how to tie my shoes until I they didn't make Velcro shoes my size. And even then, the more logical solution was to increase a demand for Velcro shoes at older ages. It was a similar reason to why it took me so long to abandon training wheels on my bike (also, if you're a parent with an autistic child, do not get them a bike with training wheels. Get them a balance bike instead). You fell over less with training wheels and needed less effort to do it. It felt like a bike with training wheels removed was an inferior product in my mind. I mean... let's use the same logic with cars. A car with two wheels is now the more "mature" option, and the other two wheels are something you're just supposed to grow out of. I realize that this isn't how people think, or how they should think. These methods are how most people break down a complex process - by only learning one part at a time. You learn to peddle before you learn how to balance the bike, so you don't have to learn both at once. That isn't how my mind works. How I learn to do something is how I learn to do something. Using a "training wheels method" when it comes to any other process, like drawing, or learning a language, or instrument means that I will be using that forever. Because it works. I have "learned" how to do something when it works. If I learned a "training wheels method" for learning how to... say drive a plane, I'd have to expend an enormous amount of effort in forgetting or moving past the training wheels method, and then make an extreme jump to actually learning something. If the plane has autopilot, why would I ever not use that? If the plane does not have autopilot, it is an inferior product to something that actually has autopilot. Once again, this is... incorrect. Or at the very least, counter-intuitive to the way the world works. It's another thing that... just compounds this creative constipation. "Just do x, y, and z" and you'll be well on your way to drawing well, for instance. Unless that is something that you will still be using at every stage of the way, all the way up to drawing the Mona Lisa, then me learning/doing that will be counter-intuitive to the process. In my video, I said the "adults are 7 heads high" thing. This is because this is how every art instructional everything tells you how to do it. Except... that it's limiting and not everybody follows that rule. Great... I would have been a much better artist if that was never, ever told to me. If I'm not supposed to draw perspective lines on every single drawing ever... I feel static in my abilities, because of this. I feel like I'll never get better at anything, because when you break a process down and remove all training wheels methods, you eventually become Shia Lebeouf shouting "Just do it!" How do I do foreign languages? "Just do it!" If I was told to practice scales. I wouldn't get good at singing. I'd get good at doing scales. I don't know how to change this. You know, I can't change the way my mind works. It's definitely a recorded symptom of Asperger's though - an excessive need for patterns and routine. This is, I guess, just the logical extreme of it. And this is just... frustrating the hell out of me. I've been at war with my own mind for awhile, now. Not just because of the focus cycle. But everything. "If you want to be good at drawing, see with your eyes, not your brain." Okay then. I'll just... turn it off? And um... maybe if I induce a coma, I'll be able to see things without my brain? But the focus cycle has been a pain in the ass. Okay, now my brain says we're gonna be making an RPG with the old engine. Three days later it tells me, oop, not that one, let's do another one. This is one's better, I promise you. It gets to the point where sometimes, I don't feel like... me anymore, if that makes any kind of sense. Sometimes it's like waking up as an entirely different person. I mean how would you live your life if there was a significant chance that tomorrow you'd be someone else, with different interests and different goals? All of this combined get you to wonder why you should even bother? If tomorrow, I'm not going to give a shit about what I'm doing today, why should I give a shit today? If anything I learn that's supposed to help me actually hinders me, how can I be certain about anything I learn? I feel... very stressed right now. I feel distant from myself. The more I learn about myself, the less I know. When "what do you want to do with your life" has a different answer every single day... it makes you ponder the question more and more with each new answer you get. You begin wondering if you're being lied to. I... don't really know what to do right now. I'm lost, and stuck, and confused, and the stress is just building and building. There is one answer that I know for certain - me, the real me, not any of this focus cycle bullshit - actually wants to finish something that I can be proud of. The only problem is that literally every other part of me seems to be getting in the way. I'd solve the lesser problems, if they could be solved... but I can't change the way my mind works.